Metadata: The Brains

The last HTML elements we will explore are involved in metadata processes. You can think of these elements as the "brains" of a webpage because they communicate vital information to the web browser, but are not visible to a webpage visitor.

<!DOCTYPE html>: Tells the web browser to expect an HTML document.

<html>...</html>: The root of the HTML document and parent of all other HTML elements on the webpage.

<head>...</head>: Enclose other metadata about the site, such as its title.

<title>...</title>: Contains the site's title, which is one way users can find your site through a search engine, like Google.

<meta charset="utf-8"/>: Tells the web browser which character set to use. In this case, the character set is "utf-8".

Instructions

Identify the html, head, title and <meta charset="utf-8"/> elements, and the !DOCTYPE declaration.

Note: In addition to the metadata elements described above, you will also notice link. We will learn about link elements in the next Unit, A Closer Look at CSS.